The KRAD Dreamcast Technical Demo and its making-of

The Dreamcast KRAD technical demo as told by a developer: when a duck paddled in the water of the new generation

To read more about Captivation Digital Laboratories (its history and involvement in Half-Life Dreamcast) and to discover an early prototype of HL DC, go to: [Inside Half-Life Dreamcast's development secrets thanks to an early prototype and exclusive testimonials]

At the 1998 E3 in Atlanta, SEGA presented the KRAD Dreamcast (Kamui Rendering ???? Demo) technical demo in “Behind Closed Doors”, held in a double-locked room, to a select group of journalists. After signing non-disclosure agreements, the lucky few, their eyes glued to the screen, discovered the Dreamcast's technological potential, even though the console's technical specifications had not yet been finalized. SEGA was sounding the death knell for older-generation consoles, and the era of 128-bit machines had begun. A legend was born, still adored 25 years after its launch!

Robert Morgan (programmer): « I remember flying out to Atlanta for E3 to help setup. One issue was the PC was behind a curtain and the controller cables weren't long enough, so I had to go to Radio Shack to get some tools and make extension cords! »

Captivation Digital Laboratories, best known for its involvement with Half-Life Dreamcast, is the development studio behind KRAD Dreamcast. This small independent Californian company, made up of 7 industry veterans, had already worked with SEGA, one of their main clients. So SOA's executives approached Captivation founder Robert Morgan (to whom we owe the italicized quotes on this page) with the idea of creating a technical demo to showcase the capabilities of the Japanese manufacturer's future console.

E3 1998 stand layout

« At E3, it wowed a lot of people. Today, it looks rather primitive, but at the time, this level of visual quality running real-time was significant »

The SET 2 graphics card

This technical demo ran on one of the ancestors of the Katana Development Kit (SET5). It was designed for the SET2, a Pentium II equipped PC with a prototype PowerVR2 graphics card. The SET2, which had been emulated for some years with the programming of a Kamui Wrapper, offered only 25% of the future power of the SET5. KRAD remains without doubt the Dreamcast's least documented technical demo, unlike Tower of Babel or the one with Shoichiro Irimajiri's head. To date, there are no videos showing KRAD in action, only photos accessible from the official Captivation Digital Laboratories (CDL) website.

« By the time this project came around, I had a fair amount of experience working with new and prototype systems, so it wasn't scary at all. I think we had a SET2 and a few sample programs from SEGA of Japan that really didn't do much, and the libraries. Since one of our goals was to push performance as much as we could, Kamui was the obvious choice. It's not a complicated system so it didn't take long to learn. This was well before GPUs so it was a traditional triangle-transform system. »

SEGA had every trust in Robert Morgan and his colleagues to carry out the mission delegated to them by the firm with the blue hedgehog. The CDL team was given only a few rough guidelines and so, on the whole, Captivation's developers were given plenty of artistic license. After providing a solid basic approach, they set to work. They fully understood the challenges of the technical demo they had to create. Working closely with SEGA of America, they were able to adapt easily, and delivered what would become KRAD in a short time.

« Sega was pretty darned happy: "They did it. I don't believe it. They did it". And so were we -- we were proud of what we put out in such a short amount of time. »

Beautiful textures for the home interior

Realized in just 7 weeks, the brevity of the timeframe was one of the main challenges. KRAD Dreamcast consisted of a technical narrative told by visual examples with scenes to enhance them, like visiting the interior of a wooden house beautifully decorated with wallpaper and another with a duck splashing in a pool of water. The story doesn't say whether the aquatic bird was just a toy or an adorable live animal. Sony, to reveal the PlayStation 3, would take up the concept of ducks swimming in a bathtub - a coincidence?

« We created a quick exporter from 3DStudio and I went about writing krad. The art crew made assets and we iterated as a group very quickly. »

The logo screen was mainly a logo, but with the addition of a metallic reflection.

The duck scene showed the water and the skylight

The outdoor scene was to show landscapes and water

The interior scene was designed for different types of transparency (per pixel, and the stacked translucency of fire).

« For the logo screen -- we also hacked together a print resolution version of it and it was on the cover of some magazine. For the "lost spot on earth", I think we generated the terrain with fractals. »

The aim of Captivation was to demonstrate the quality and speed of Dreamcast rendering. As this was a demo without the interactive aspect of a video game, the developers were able to focus entirely on rendering. They also wanted to take advantage of the VR chip's special features, such as light volumes and transparency.

« The VR chip was real good -- I didn't have to worry about sorting, which was often a pain in those days. The quality of the triangles was great -- great edges in particular; and multiple levels of transparency. »

A lost spot on earth

With processors much more limited back then than today, and before GPUs (graphics processing units) did most of the work, developers had a tough time. With few tools at their disposal, and Dreamcast development in its infancy, they had to examine and determine what could and couldn't be executed.

« The light volumes needed some experimentation to understand what they really did. I remember spending a fair amount of time on performance -- notably the perspective divide was costly so I hacked in a table lookup for a reciproca. »

KRAD is part of the Dreamcast legend. This demo deserves to be reinstated in the historical chronology of the White Lady. On May 21, 1998, in Japan, journalists marveled at Yu Suzuki's Tower of Babel technical demo, or Tetsuya Mizuguchi's (SEGA Rally, REZ, Child of Eden, etc.) Iri demo, during the SEGA New Challenge Conference. On the other side of the Atlantic, a few days later, Americans had the honor of seeing KRAD demonstrated at E3.

SEGA, on all fronts, definitely launched hostilities in the sixth-generation console war!

I'd like to thank Robert Morgan for his availability, his kindness and for taking the time to answer my questions. His testimonial takes us back in time to the development of KRAD Dreamcast, and helps us understand what was at stake in this technical demo designed for SET2!

Special thanks to :

La Rétrogamerie for proof-reading, rewording and editing the text
Neil Riddaway for the English correction of the article

In my research focused on unreleased games, I have had the opportunity to interview a number of developers. I took the opportunity I had to create some articles for these cancelled games, complete with previously unpublished information:

Please feel free to read my other articles by clicking here